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12 May 2004 - Sizzle
Sometimes you just need a little spice in your life. And why stop at a little? Why not go for the gusto and have an entire bottle at your disposal? S. and I tend to go through olive oil as though it's water, him being Middle Eastern he was practically fed it instead of formula and me? Well, I had very little knowledge of the slick, liquid gold until I left my mother's kitchen for my own. It's not that my mom dislikes olive oil (in fact, she really loves it), it's just that she doesn't see the point in having it in your cupboard as a staple. She thinks of it as more like a luxury and only buys a small bottle of it when she wants to make oven-roasted new potatoes... which is often enough that she'll go though the bottle in a few months (a few months! can you imagine having a 150 ml bottle of olive oil in your kitchen cupboard for a month?!?), but not so often to actually keep buying olive oil after it's gone. During one of my very domestic days not long ago I decided to whip up a batch of my infamous (well, in this apartment at least) spicy olive oil. I had made it before but we had recently run out...and we cannot live without it -- I use it for dipping bread, for making pasta sauce, for making bread and bread sticks, for marinades. Heck I've even used it with butter on popcorn! It's a sickness, I fear. So, lazy Sunday afternoon, a big jug of extra-virgin olive oil, a hand full of dried chili's, a generous spoonful of crushed chili's, some pink peppercorns, a whole whack of black peppercorns and some very generous dashes of chili powder. Chili, chili and more chili. Yum. All of this went into my well-seasoned and much loved cast-iron pan and was heated slowly but thoroughly on the stove. I let it cool and then poured it all through a sieve into a cleaned and somewhat sterilized scotch bottle (much nicer than the green of a wine bottle, I think). Perfecto! By
the way, I changed the photo on the About
page...S. insisted that in the old one I looked mean-spirited and
tired, rather than the lovely, happy-go-lucky domestic goddess we
all know and love. Right.
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